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Wednesday, March 14, 2012

FMF Day 6 - Santa Fe, NM

Ahhhh ..... nothing like a nice "nap" - that lasted about 6 hours. Let's see if I sleep tonight. Anyway here I am in Santa Fe!

The trip so far:the journey
About 260 miles today (again I didn't write it down - oops), so a little over 1700 so far.

Here was the start of my day while still in Amarillo:

Walking out to the cars (Where does one buy cadillac seeds, anyway?)

The pile of empty spray paint cans. I'm sure this is just a day or two's worth

Well SOMEBODY got creative! (yes, that's a bra)

A close-up. The date there is 3/12/12. I'm surprised it's still visible

The gate to the field

By the way, the Ranch is on .........

.... so I get Route 66 credit, too!

The start of my ride was like this - flat ....

... until about 15 miles from the NM border, when it turned into this

I arrived in Santa Fe around 1:30, met a lovely woman in the hotel lobby who dropped me off at Zia's (for lunch).

Then I did a small walking tour, doing lots of shopping, lusting on the pottery, and seeing my surroundings. This picture isn't very good, but I wanted to show you the mountains.

It was a beautiful day - around 60 (and you can see how clear!), but it had snowed last week. I found this small patch during my walk, and I hope this (and the mountain caps) is all the snow I see during my trip!

I just had to take a pic of the fencing. So interesting!

Tomorrow I'll head up to the Plaza for some more wandering and shopping and of course a visit to the Georgia O'Keeffe museum. It is Spring Break here (who knew? and I still got a great deal on a hotel!) so apparently there are lots more people than usual. Who cares? I'll talk to them all! I'm so glad I've been walking "every" day (at home); it makes for easy visiting around town. Alas I am having to cut my stay short by one day to avoid some unpleasant weather forecast for Sunday at my next stop. That means I'll be spending an extra day in Las Vegas. Oh darn the luck!!

Random thoughts of the day:

Outside of Amarillo I passed a big windmill farm, then a cattle ranch and if you though skunks were bad ..... ewwwwwwww ..... I've never smelled anything that awful! If I had smellavision, I wouldn't subject you to that. Uck!

The altitude at Amarillo is 3600 and change - enough for octane to have dropped a point. Altitude here in Santa Fe is 7000. I'm only feeling the dry, not the altitude.

Knowing that I'm going to write this blog each evening makes me look at my surroundings differently. I want to tell you what I see even though I can't always stop and take pictures. Today I'm in vast, wide-open spaces that a camera couldn't capture, anyway. Just gorgeous!

I love it that semis are not boring colors anymore. I passed a blue-green one, bright purple and dark purple ones, bright blue and bright yellow. So fun!

I saw lots of signs that said some version of "engine braking not allowed". Well ... I didn't know what that was, so I looked it up! Here's the wiki.